When her cousin, Kathy,
called to say that Opal had passed on, Lucia felt a strange combination
of relief and terror. Opal was the last of her mother’s sisters left
to be buried; she still hadn’t gotten over the shock of her own mother’s
death, and going through her aunts’ was like reliving it anew. The
loss was magnified each time, regardless of the fact that her aunts did
not parallel her mother in manner or emotion—the physical resemblance
was enough. At least, she thought, after this one, there won’t be
any more.

It did not surprise
her when Kathy expressed the desire to have Opal buried in the old cemetery
in Framingham. Clinging to the telephone handset like a lifeline, Lucia
did what was expected of her by suggesting that Kathy bury her mother in
the empty grave that Lucia and her brother, Harris, who was three years
her elder, had owned since their own mother’s death. Mama had scraped
her finances and bought the eight-grave burial plot, together with her parents-in-law,
just prior to Lucia’s father’s burial. She would have to call
Harris to check with him, and with the cemetery groundskeeper to see if
the baby, her tiny unknown elder sister, stillborn, could be moved.

“I don’t
know why Mom had her buried that way,” Lucia explained, twisting her
salt and pepper hair behind her ear with her forefinger, “but I wouldn’t
feel right putting Opal between Mom and the baby.” She said she would
let Kathy know just as soon as she spoke with Harris, and hung up the phone.

Lucia had been nine
years old when her father died, and only vaguely remembered the purchase
of the burial plot. What she did remember with clarity were the long dark
weeks, waiting for the company to reopen the mine, nightmares of her father
wandering, stumbling in the sealed black shafts, searching for an escape.
She hadn’t realized for a long time that he had been immediately and
mercifully killed by the blast, days before the mine was sealed, in the
first few minutes after the explosion, and that he could never have been
able to walk out.

When they finally
removed his body from the mine she had not been allowed to see him, forbidden
by her mother, who handed her his lunch pail as an act of appeasement. It
was a familiar object, dull metal and rounded like a cask, heavy in her
small hands. Lucia’s father had passed it to her every evening when
he returned from work, smudged and smeared with coal dust, only the whites
of his eyes and his smile visible through the grime. He would leave her
treats, the remains of his dessert or some fruit in the lunch pail’s
metal innards.

When Mama took it
from his body and gave it to Lucia at the morgue, it had been latched, just
as it was while he carried it, still in the crook of his arm when they found
his corpse. When Lucia opened it, the grapes he had taken with him on the
day he was killed were still in it—he had saved them for her; only
now they were raisins, a shriveled memory of what he had meant for her to
have. It was the heat that killed him, they said, he hadn’t been directly
in the explosion, just consumed by the resulting blast of scorching air.
That’s why he wasn’t burned like the rest of the men; he was
dried, instead, like a raisin. He had been found, crumpled and broken, only
a few feet from the elevatorportal.

After he had died
their mother was gone, always, and when she was home she studied, always—she
had been a teacher before she was married, and had to renew her certificate
with additional college credits. It had been at least fifteen years since
she’d been in the classroom; marriage had rendered her legally unable
to teach, but the law had since been changed.

Lucia took care of
the groceries, stopping on her way home from school, charging the necessities
on the ever-growing bill at the local market. She cooked for her grandparents,
and then waited for her mother to come home, the dutiful daughter, grownup
too fast. Lucia scrubbed, swept, and studied, struggling through the fourth,
then the fifth grade, and onward through high school, then professional
school. Harris had found other things to do: he played ball, was a Boy Scout,
hitchhiked to the neighboring towns for work, found his way into college.
Lucia took care of everything at home, while their mother formed into a
person she no longer knew, plodding along, gagging back emotion, immersed
in books, always stoic, always remote and isolated.

She had told Kathy
that she would have to check with Harris, and she called him that same evening.
They traded data on the status of their spouses, their children, and Harris’s
grandchildren before Lucia presented the reason for the call. Harris did
not seem particularly mournful about Opal’s death, and Lucia knew
that he would not come to this funeral, either. Their parents’ respective
funerals had been enough; he did not plan to attend another. When she asked
about moving the baby next to their mother to make room for Opal, she heard
him suck in his breath, like he had been slapped, and she knew that his
answer would not be what Kathy wanted.

“No, Lucia,”
he said. “Leave that baby be.” He made a choking sound. “She’s
been moved enough…she should be allowed to rest in peace.”

Lucia felt confused,
and angry with her brother for his insensitivity to their cousin’s
wishes; her mother was dead, and it was the least they could do. “What
do you mean?” she asked him, “How can you say..?”

“No.”
he interrupted, “Think. Do the math. Lucia, I buried that baby.”

Something rustled
in her head—a twinge of an image. Her mother, Harris, and herself,
a triptych in the cemetery, framed by the mountains, under the bitter spring
sky.

“No.”
Harris said. “She doesn’t need to be moved again.”

Then she remembered
everything. Standing on the cemetery hillside in the green-gray spring,
ten years old, Mama and Harris facing each other, Lucia gazing across the
expanse of rowed headstones, the colorless sky spitting drizzle, the wind
sporadically whipping through her black curls. She remembered pushing the
wheelbarrow, feet tripping in loose pebbles, along the road from the house,
the whole three miles to the cemetery, and stopping in the old part, mysterious
and deteriorating. They visited the new part every Sunday, and had since
their father had been buried, but the old part seemed foreign to Lucia.
Cold and distant, with its crumbling headstones and less-kept lawn, the
old part seemed indifferent and still, in contrast to the new part, which
waxed cruel and mocking, holding her father in its breast.

Mama’s hand
enclosed her own, palm sweating, grip tightening. Her face was still, expressionless,
as it has been for the past year, but her eyes were teary. Lucia searched
her mother’s face as they stood still beside a splintering headstone,
but could decipher no message. Harris fidgeted a few feet away, his gangly
limbs stiff in the spattering drizzle. The downtrodden wheelbarrow, visibly
rusting in the spring rain, held the old shovels and a few sparse plants,
weeds really, that Lucia had gathered. It seemed like ages before the shiny
black car came purring out of the valley and around the side of the hill,
stopping where they stood. Under other circumstances, Harris might have
admired the vehicle, but now he remained silent, clutching the wooden and
splintery wheelbarrow handle.

The car drifted to
a stop and a tall man stretched out, dressed in a woolen suit. Lucia remembered
having seen him in the city building, talking to Mama, asking her to sign
paper after paper. She had dangled her feet, watching, until Mama had given
him a check and collected her from the hard wooden bench where she waited.
Now he said nothing, only nodded, seemingly setting things in motion, reviving
them from their shared trance.

Mama shuddered, grimaced,
blinked at Harris. Harris lifted the spade. It made a slurping sound as
he drove it into the patch of grass in front of the time worn and tiny metal
temporary marker, but the soil came loose with ease, and a pile began to
form beside the growing hole. The suited man was staring into the pallid
sky, arms crossed tight against his cotton-shirted chest, avoiding Lucia’s
gaze. They idled for what seemed like hours, watching Harris fumble with
the spade and the mounting pile of cemetery dirt. Lucia inspected the worms
emerging from the growing mound, watched her brother, and tried to inch
forward to peer into the gash the spade was creating. Mama, still clammy
clamped onto Lucia’s hand, held her back.

The shovel hit something
then, a dull thudding, a hollow sound. Harris bent, squinting into the opening
in the ground, and scraped the edge of the shovel around inside. Her mother
broke the silence, instructing Lucia to stay still, and walked to the edge
of the pit. Mama and Harris worked together then, each wielding a shovel,
grunting, they lifted a small, disheveled box out of the ground. It was
plain pine, unadorned, its surface fibrous and gapped.

“Gently,”
whispered Mama, her voice quavering, and Harris, nodded, lowering his eyes.
As they deposited the casket into the wheelbarrow, Lucia saw bits of fabric
poking through the ragged tears in the wood, and an earthy, pungent odor
filled her nostrils, stifling her sense of calm. The city man continued
to look away. Mud was smeared down the front of Mama’s work dress.

The rubber tire on
the barrow was slightly flat, and it made a whumpy-humming noise as Harris
steered it through the dampened grass and muck, to the new part of the graveyard.
Mama, carrying a shovel, towed Lucia along, several yards behind. The other
shovel, in Lucia’s grip, bounced along the ground as she dragged it
behind her over the road, the path, and the cemetery lawn. The man followed.
When they reached the family plot, in the new section of the grounds, Harris
stopped, the wheelbarrow sliding, almost tipping in the grass. Mama sighed,
and stood between Harris, Lucia, and their earth-entombed father, touching
her mouth, then her hair, looking a decade older than she had a year ago.
She pointed to another spot, where Harris immediately began to dig.

Lucia sat on her father’s
grave and stroked the headstone absentmindedly, while her mother and Harris
struggled with the clay soil

at the other end of
the plot. The man was there, behind her, not even facing them anymore, just
there—Lucia could feel his hesitance, his desire to be back in his
office, in his house, or anywhere else but here. She coughed, and looked
down at the new grass, hoping that her father could feel her sitting there,
watchful.

After seeming ages
had passed, Mama and Harris lowered the fragmenting casket into the new
grave; the city man had looked into it and nodded in approval when the opening
had reached the appropriate depth. Lucia was closer now; Mama had forgotten
to hold her back and away, so as not to see. The baby’s tiny coffin
was as long as Lucia’s leg, and clearly rotted in spots—now
Lucia stared at the box, and saw more than the soft, decaying fabric of
the baby’s shroud—she caught a glimpse of a tiny limb, bone
exposed, ashen flesh. They lowered the coffin into the hole.

It took less time
to cover her up, and the baby, safely placed nearer her father by the hands
of her mourning mother and the brother she never knew, was beneath the ground
again, her lonely spot decorated with wilted weeds picked by an equally
unknown sister. Mama glanced at the city man, shakily signed another paper
retrieved from the depths of the big black car, and then they headed home,
wheelbarrow bumping back the same path it came. At home that evening, after
baths, Mama drew both children near.

“I’m sorry,”
she had breathed, almost inaudibly, and they understood that there had been
no other way.

“Lucia! Are
you there? Say something…please!” Harris was bellowing into
the phone, his voice pitched in alarm. Lucia shook the haze of recollection
out of her brain, and realized she had somehow slipped from her chair and
was now sitting, childlike, folded on the floor.

“I’m here,”
she panted, her voice small and mewling. “Stop yelling. I was just
thinking for a moment. You’re right, Harris, the baby should stay
where she is.”

Opal was buried on
a frigidly cold, sleet riddled Monday. After the graveside service, Lucia
slipped from the crowd at the cemetery, and with her children and husband
she huddled over the family burial plot. A deer had walked over the three
occupied graves, scavenging for the tender shoots of plants just starting
to peek through the dwindling snow. It had left droppings, small and frozen,
on Lucia’s mother’s grave. Lucia stood, flanked by her children,
swaddled in her husband’s sport coat, breaking the cold that cut through
her mourning dress.

She reflected on the
events of the last few days, thinking aloud: “It’s all about
getting a little further than where you started from….”

Lucia, now nearly
at retirement, was ages away from the place where her mother had lived,
physically, emotionally; she was also miles away from the childhood she
was just now allowing herself to recall. She hadn’t—and purposefully
so—married a miner. Her children had knowledge of poverty and desperation,
yet had blessedly little understanding of the hardships she’d faced.
These fierce, flawed two, her daughter and son, had gaped at her, eyes filled
with tears and a hinting of shame, when she had described her newly-formed
memory to explain why Opal could not be buried here, and why the baby would
not be moved.

They both had only
nodded, haltingly, in agreement and astonishment when she’d asked,
as an afterthought: “I guess it would all be considered child abuse
today, wouldn’t it?”